The title "Carrying Fire" is taken from Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men,in which Sheriff Ed Tom Bell talks about his own father. “I had two dreams about him after he died. I don’t remember the first one all that well. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen that he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.”

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Getting There

After completing their B-17 training in
Sioux City and spending ten day’s leave with friends and family,
Don Christensen and the other newly-trained pilots and crews
assembled back at Lincoln on December 27. Some were assigned to fly
new B-17G’s to England, while most were to sail by troop ship. The
Christensen, Coffee, and Colville crews were all sorely disappointed
to be in the latter group.

In early January they rode by rail to
Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, an assembly point of embarkation for Europe
for all branches of service. They waited there several weeks for
their shipping-out orders, wondering what their destination would be.
It snowed heavily the day they arrived and while standing at-ease
waiting on orders of the day they began a snowball fight between
officers and enlisted men, much to the displeasure of a regular Army
Colonel who did not appreciate such association between ranks. To
the young bomber crews this was normal fun and they often considered
regular army officers a bunch of stuffed suits.

One evening Don and his officers went
into New York City on a pass to visit the famous Jack Dempsey’s
night club. His friend Marvin Coffee cryptically recalls that
evening: “Don Christensen’s officers joined with us. We went
into a club which was reported to have a good show. Seated at
another table was a young man who bought us a round of drinks. The
waitress advised us that he was a wealthy heir to the Garwood Boat
Company. We raised our glassed and this was when we discovered there
was more that this young man had in store for us. At this period of
our culture, and needing to be more macho, we were quite unfamiliar
and threatened by men who were called ‘queens.’ We lost our
desire to finish our drinks or to see the show; we got out of there.”

On January 20, Don wrote to his mother
and sister about that evening, “I got a chance to get into N.Y.
last night but was highly disappointed as the old city has lost much
of its peacetime glamour. Times Square is practically dark and since
I don’t drink I couldn’t find much to do and lost a full night’s
sleep to boot as we didn’t get back to base ‘til 6 AM. As you
can see by now another leave is out of the question. We are on our
way. Just where is hard to imagine. The campaign in Europe has
certainly taken on a bright aspect during the past couple of days.
It doesn’t look as if the Russians will be stopped this time.
Whatever happens I don’t believe it will affect our sailing
however.”

Within a few days they boarded the S.S.Aquitania, now a converted troop ship and sister ship of the
ill-fated Lusitania, along with 3000 other troops. They still
did not know where they were going or what their assignment would be.
Don and the other officers were quartered in staterooms for two that
were so small both men could not move around at the same time.
However, as Coffee remarks, “This was luxury compared to the
quarters of our enlisted crew members. They were located in the hold
of the ship below the waterline near the keel so they could hear
water moving around in the hull beneath their location. It was dark
and dingy with a terrible musty odor. They had to sleep in canvas
bunks that I am sure were less than 20” apart from top to bottom.”
With such cramped conditions most men spent much of their time on
deck wearing the required life vests.

Distinctions between ranks also
extended to their food service. Enlisted men got two meals a day and
stood in line for hours for them. By contrast, officers had specific
seating times for three meals, sat two to a table, and were waited on
by British personnel. Coffee continues: “There were tablecloths,
china, and sterling silver flatware on every table. There was a
waiter who would wait on two tables or four persons. If I placed my
soiled fork down on the plate or cloth, the waiter would immediately
replace it with a clean one. The food was excellent.” However,
this discrimination between their treatment and that of their
enlisted men did not sit well with many AAF officers, and they often
took fresh fruit and packaged items from the officer’s mess to
share with their enlisted crew members.

In a letter to Jocile who was three
months pregnant, Don wrote, “Somewhere in the Atlantic, Nearing
Destination, No Date Allowed. I don’t suppose it would do any harm
to mention that we are on one of the largest and formerly one of the
most luxurious of the old peacetime liners. It is still large and
fast but one could hardy say it is luxurious in its present
condition. Nearly every foot of usable space has been converted to
accommodations for troops and we are packed in like so many
proverbial sardines.” Then, facing the reality of war, he
continues, “Darling, every roll of the ship and every vibration of
the engines makes me realize that I am getting farther and farther
from my beloved little family. It’s almost more than I can bear to
think of it. We’ve been separated before, but this time it seems
so final and the future so uncertain that it’s more like a bad
dream, and I keep thinking I’ll surely wake up soon…My love for
you has grown more intense with every mile that separates us. At any
rate nothing can mar the memory of our last 6 months together and the
little bit of borrowed heaven we had. I love you more than life
itself and when this is all over I’ll be glad I was able to be a
part of it. All my love, Daddy Don”

During their eight-day voyage across
the Atlantic they encountered a tremendous storm and an unidentified
submarine. Marvin Coffee remembers, “The biggest waves seemed much
higher than our ship as we would be in the bottom of the swell
looking up to the top of the water. During the storm the ship would
porpoise on the mountainous waves and the ship’s screw would come
out of the water…the screw would rev up in the air and cause a
severe vibration which was felt throughout the ship…The ship’s
crew members said it was the worst storm they had ever encountered.”
Another day, a submarine was sighted which was not identified and
did not respond to communication so all troops were ordered topside
in life vests. “Things were tense and I did not feel safe from
that moment until I was back on land. You understand how helpless
you are in the middle of the ocean…We were also sailing without an
escort, giving one a deep sense of vulnerability. Perhaps this same
feeling of uncertainty and vulnerability will be repeated over the
skies of Europe.”

They disembarked at Glasgow, Scotland,
where they were put up in temporary quarters while being sorted out
by assignments. There they saw other servicemen, fresh from battle,
being rotated back to the states on the same ship. Don noticed that
these men were in good spirits at going home but looked older than
their years. Soon the new crews were put aboard trains, still not
knowing their destination. “The English trains were our first
experience in coping with a lack of knowledge on how things worked in
this country”, Coffee wrote. “The train had compartments which
opened to the platforms with no way to walk a corridor . . . unlike
those to which we were accustomed in the states. The train stopped
in one city and we all got off to see whatever there was to see.
There was no one to announce “all aboard” as we know it and the
train just started moving. About half of our group was left behind:
this did not meet with much favor when we reached our point to
disembark which turned out to be Royston. Trucks had to be sent to
pick up those left behind.”

At Royston they learned that their new
assignment was with the 398th Bomb Group at Station 131, in nearby
Nuthampstead. Arriving there on February 1, the four replacement
crews were led by Lieutenants Don Christensen, Marvin Coffee, Richard
Ellis, and Paul Coville. Marvin Coffee would be the only one of the
four to survive the war unscathed.

Lt. Donald R. Christensen

About Me

"This is a tribute to my father's life and his war. His name was Lt. Donald R. Christensen and he was a B-17 pilot with the 8th Air Force in England during World War II. He was stationed with the 398th Bomb Group at Nuthampstead. England, and was a member of the 603rd Squadron. He and all but one of his crew men were killed on March 2, 1945, when the tail was shot off of his aircraft by enemy fighters the plane crashed near Slany, Czechoslovkia (today's Czech Republic.) Tail gunner Selmer Haakenson was the sole survivor. I was two and a half years old.

I have been haunted by the loss of my father all my life, and after 70 years I still grieve. For the last 25 years or more I have been sporadically combing through old papers and photographs, military records, books relating to the 8th Air Force, and talking with many veterans of the 398th BG. I have been wanting to tell his story for a long time, and the 70th anniversary of his death seems like an appropriate time to get off my duff and honor his memory in words and pictures."

My Mission

I am a World War II researcher and my mission has been mainly to find out about my father. His name was Lt. Donald R. Christensen and he was a B-17 pilot with the 8th Air Force in England during World War II. He was stationed with the 398th Bomb Group at Nuthampstead. England, and was a member of the 603rd Squadron. He and all but one of his crew men were killed on March 2, 1945, when the tail was shot off of his aircraft by enemy fighters the plane crashed near Slany, Czechoslovkia

I have been been on this quest most of my life, but more seriously in the last 25 years or so. Now I'm ready to write about it.

Thank you for visiting my page and taking the time to read this material. I welcome all comments.

To see a slideshow that I made honoring the 70th anniversary of my father's fatal plane crash, see here.